Tag Archives: depression

I haven’t been able to write since Carnival. I’ve written, but I haven’t been able to write about my time here. I keep trying to write it, or think about writing it, and there are so many other strands, other parts, other stories I need to write that keep twisting their way in, and I realise that there’s much more to this telling than the events that happened at the end of February. I’m trying to go back and prise them all out, carefully, hold them up to my ears and listen to what they’re trying to tell me, because I can feel that they want to be told, and that I need to tell them.

So I’ll try again.

Dispatch From Martinique

Carnaval

I’m really excited for Carnival. Really excited. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I felt so excited. I tell everyone so. ‘I haven’t been this excited in such a long time!’ When was the last time? My 22nd birthday, perhaps? I sat at a table full of loved ones, ate cheap Sardinian pizza and got drunk on good red wine; then I went to a murky London pub and laughed and laughed, then a taxi home with my boyfriend and his roommate and we chatted about what socialism really means, apologised to the taxi driver for our ramblings who said, ‘No no, I enjoyed that.’ Yes – I was happy – happier than I’d been in a long time – excited happy – jubilant happy – a higher sort of high than what my body could remember. It had been a while. And right after that, something happened that plunged me into misery, and the fall from being so high was what made the misery so great.

And before that? I suppose before that was before I had depression. When I was twenty I had these higher highs all the time – walking home in the pummelling rain and turning my face upwards to feel every beat of it – strolling through a green park with my friend after swimming through clear lighted water – lying on the summer grass beside a boy I loved – allowing myself to be swallowed whole by love and crazy longing. Feeling everything, seeing everything. Depression was like being plunged beneath a sea, where every sense, before so sharp and vibrant, was now muffled and clouded by thick, muting water. Sometimes, even walking down the street, I felt like my whole body was being pushed down upon by this sea, and I had to push my limbs through it, push my way through an ocean just to move, or speak, or breathe.

Once, when it was getting really bad, I was in my flat, sat at the kitchen table, opposite my flatmate Lydia. I couldn’t look her in the eyes. That happens when I’ve gone that far away. My head was pulled down by a weight and my eyes could see only my hands wrapped round a cup, the hardness of the table. She was looking at me, quietly, trying to figure out what to do. We had a vase of yellow-orange roses on the table. They were beginning to fade. I turned to them and slowly reached my hand out. My fingers felt the dried-up petals, the grooves and veins running through them, the softness that, at this point of vulnerability, right on the edge of death, felt suddenly so much softer. In its own way, richer. Urgently beautiful, and listlessly dying.

‘Right now,’ I said, ‘These flowers are the only thing I can really feel.’

Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because of Carnival.

Dimanche Gras

I go out to see Carnival on its first day, Dimanche Gras, Fat Sunday. Sunday is the quieter, family day, the highlight of which is the revelation of the Vaval, the giant, papier-mâché king who leads the parade, pushing slow rings around Fort-de-France. I am out with Jane and Tom and we run into others we know, students we teach. There are people in wild, outlandish dress that today is standard and expected. Tacky wigs in neon purple, orange, green. Platform heels and netted stockings running up the hairy calves of sauntering men, many proving their allegiance to the Club of Male by assuming hypersexualised female dress on the sanctioned Day of Transgression – although some are more relaxed, less saunteringly macho, fun. It’s a celebration of fun, first and foremost. Mischievous, rule-bending fun.

The atmosphere is relatively calm, an easy-going vibrancy. Some of the people on floats even looked bored. We look out for the figures we’ve been hearing about: the banana women, dresses and headdresses made of broad green banana leaves; the red devils; bare-chested men with molasses poured over them, women too, the black sticky syrup darkening their skin in homage to the Africans brought over as slaves. When a band of drummers approaches, I run back and forth to make the most of their rhythms – those rhythms! That drumming! It electrifies the feet and hips. Hypnotic, it refuses to let you go. I love it.

That’s at three in the afternoon. By six, the crowd is blazing trails through the Fort-de-France circuit, rushing blood of the city pumping round and round its system. Various lewd chants are jubilantly flung into the air by hundreds and hundreds in unison: Je vais tout péter!Je vais tout péter! (I’m going to smash everything up!)[1] Other popular ones include variations on the theme of ‘Fuck your mother’, and there’s one triumphant-sounding song that, weirdly, takes the tune of The Police’s ‘Every Step You Take’.

By six, we’ve headed back to Jane and Tom’s flat, right in the centre of town, overlooking the parade. The people flow beneath us like a swirling, unstoppable river – and the noise! The atmosphere is no longer quiet but mad, crazy loud. Never-ending rhythms, beats, pounding, banging, calling out – and then there are the bwajak cars. These ancient vehicles are refitted purely for the purpose of Carnival, and their shitty engines – which probably aren’t legally fit for the road[2] – make an incredibly loud BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP banging sound as they heave through the streets. They’re abusive to the ears, so much so that after several hours, we’re drained by them. But people are happy. Their energy wafts up towards us as we peer out over the balcony. Above us all, the sun sets.

By eight o’clock, the sun and drums and beer have knackered me, and I go home early. In fact, my body is probably much weaker than I could feel in my earlier exhilaration, since I’ve just come out of one bedridden week of flu. Once recovery prodded impatiently, I felt a surge of crazy-high energy, to write, to do, to get out, out, out of the house and see what I could see. I was excited.

I get home and decide I better not push it. The next day, Monday – transvestite wedding day – I’ll rest and save my energy. I’ll need energy for Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, the big one.

Mardi Gras

We all get together for pre-drinks and costuming. The theme to Mardi Gras is, apparently, ‘red’. My friends have brought face paint, glitter, stick-on jewels that I stick on my skin, shoulders, under-eyes, the peak of my chest. We play silly games and take pictures and chat, and then finally we make our way out and hit the street, where barricades have been set up so security guards can confiscate alcohol smuggled in plastic bottles. They watch people chug back the contents they were intending to savour over hours, and then let them through. I see no police about, at that time or any time after.

It’s overcast, but here, even overcast is filled with light. It starts to rain, and locals complain, but I love it. We start dancing, waiting for the right drumming band to come along, running into the parade to follow a big float with a popular DJ drawing a crowd of followers, then slipping back out to the sidelines, waiting for the drums, the right drums… There they are!

I dance-glide-walk beside this band that drum and sing and drum and sing and change rhythm and pace but never, ever stop. All my muscles sing together. At one point, mid pulsing movement, I see some of my female students watching on the sidelines. They grin and wave at me. I grin back, throw them a kiss, and dance on.

It’s magic. The rain, the drums, my friends nearby, the city that I’ve come to know so much better than in those first, tense weeks when I saw a gunman flash through the street. It’s a good moment.

We head to Jane and Tom’s flat, where we end up watching the parade from up high again, dancing from the balcony and catching our breath. The six o’clock peak hits, and there it is once more – the river of people, the songs, the chanting, the drums, the jubilance. Eventually there are about twenty of us packed into this tiny place, and before we know it night has fallen again. We decide to head back out.

A week afterwards, back at school, I’m talking to my colleagues about Carnival, and how the atmosphere sharply changes once the sun goes down. A number of them tell me, ‘Oh, but I never go out after dark! No no! Once it’s seven o’clock, I go home. It’s dangerous.’

Yes, like troubled Fort-de-France itself, Carnival changes after dark. The spirit and energy of the event shifts and mutates into something darker, seared through with drunkenness, harder drugs, and danger. Crack cocaine is the drug of choice in the city; I’ve seen many wanderers move through the streets in slow-motion, eyes glazed, faraway.

But it’s not just that. Tonight, when the sun is down – that’s when all the rules are really torn to bits. The bwajak cars zoom through the streets with handfuls of women sat astride them, nonchalant. The crowd seeps through the lesser arteries of the city, beyond the confines of the parade circuit. We see a fight break out. There’s celebration still, of course, people are still following floats and dancing to music; but you can feel it in the air, something’s shifted. Things aren’t stable.

We’ve decided to leave the flat and get back into the parade, but moving twenty-plus people is no quick task. I’m already out the door with a couple of others, and the door is lingering open for more to follow. We are mostly women. Two unknown men come up the stairs, talking loudly, and when they see us they ask us something I can’t immediately make out. Can’t help you, we tell them.

‘Was it you?’ they ask.

‘What?’

They’ve stopped, and keep asking us if it was us that did it. What? They’re angry, very angry, and talking very loudly, with increasing aggression. A girl follows them; she seems calmer. She explains: they think someone inside this flat was pouring beer or water on them from their balcony.

‘No, no,’ we tell them. We don’t know what they’re talking about. They start to continue up the stairs; we turn back to our friends who are still inside the flat, unaware; and then the two men suddenly change their minds, come back down the stairs, and barge their way into the flat.

Jane is there. ‘No – ’ she starts to say, and they push her aside, make their way to her balcony.

It all happens very quickly. We yell at them – what are you doing, get the fuck out! They aren’t listening. Their female friend waits at the door and does nothing. Eventually they make their way back to the threshold of the door, where I’m still standing. We’re still yelling at them, they’re still yelling at us – ‘Was it you? Was it you?’

‘No, it wasn’t us!’

‘You’re not laughing at us?’

‘No!’

Siobhan points to the door. ‘The door is there, so get out.’

One of them grabs the door and slams it against the wall. ‘What fucking door!’ he yells. They’re off their faces.

After a few more moments of this agitated back-and-forth, they eventually calm down enough to reluctantly concede that they may be wrong. ‘It definitely wasn’t you?’

‘No.’

Finally they leave. They continue to climb the stairs of the apartment complex, banging on random doors to try and find out Who It Was.

‘Let’s just get the fuck out, now,’ I say. I’m shaken. They were right next to me. They just barged their way in.

*

We’re walking and dancing down the street, and everyone’s much drunker. Not me – I’ve decided I better keep my senses sharp and alert. I try to dance and get back into the fun, but it’s different now. The river of people disperses and the cars and motorcycles thread paths through us, their drivers certainly drunk by now. The pulse of the night is less energetic, duller, but it’s seeped through the city like a deep red wine stain soaking into cloth. A smell – a strong smell – incense?

‘What’s that smell?’

A hooded figure in a nun’s habit streams by us, a huge globe of frankincense swinging from its hand – another cross-dressing man, out to outdo everyone? Then the figure glances back and I see – no, a woman! Her eyes wide and mouth drawn tight. She’s angry. She’s a little afraid, perhaps; but she’s determined, too. The smoke wafts up from her swinging globe. She hurries to a bwajak car that’s slowed down, sticks her head in the window and starts yelling at the driver.

‘I think that’s a real nun.’ It’s only a moment that I see her, but the look on her face – she wasn’t out for fun. She was on a mission. To cleanse the streets of sin.

On Rue de la Liberté, the river coalesces again into a throng of people dancing, following DJ- and dancer-topped floats. We take a detour into a smaller street where people have set up their own drums, their own sound systems. We have to push our way through a thick crowd, single file.

Suddenly I feel a hand grab me between the legs. I don’t see who it is, the people push by too fast. In that moment, that second, I feel the imprint of fingers on my genitals, and the imprint lingers, I can still feel it well after the hand has gone. It’s exactly like the first time I was groped, aged thirteen, also pushing through a crowd, the perfect opportunity for a coward. The ghost of that sensation of a stranger’s fingers there, even after a split second’s impact, lingering on. The touch that says, ‘You’re not a person, you’re a piece of trash on the street that I can kick about if I want, and I want to.’ I didn’t tell my parents at the time. Tonight, the incident slips seamlessly into the violence hanging everywhere upon the night, squeezed and wrung out of the very air.

After a few minutes of dancing and trying to get into the rhythm again, we decide to slip back out of this tiny, crowded street. I turn around and see my friend Esmé yelling at a man who looks furious, and another friend, Álvar, is trying to calm him down. I’m not sure what’s happened, has he made a pass at Esmé? We’re pushing our way back out to the main street, we push back through that thick knotted rope of people crushed between cars and sound systems.

Finally, we’re back – and then I turn and see that that furious man has pushed his way through the crowd to catch up with us. Beside me is my friend Tess. He heads straight for her. Later I find out what had happened: he had gone up behind her to dance pressed against her body, she had turned around and slapped him, we tried to make our way out as Esmé yelled and Álvar tried to calm him. Now he’s here, anger etched into his every movement. And every movement, every gesture that he makes is slow, purposeful, filled to the brim with that fury. Tessa is a tall girl, but this guy is huge, fat, broad, at least a head taller. He stands right in front of her and glares. I’m beside her.

He booms, ‘You don’t hit people!’

I don’t catch what Tess says. All I see is that she stands her ground, looks him straight in the eye, not egging on, not challenging, but standing her ground, and she answers. Then he swings his arm back and slaps her in the face with full force. She almost falls over, one of my hands shoots out to grab her, the other shoots out in front of him, I step forward and start yelling as loud as I can, drowned as we are beneath the muffled blanket of dance music and shouts and cries and laughter.

‘FUCK THE FUCK OFF MOTHERFUCKER,’ I yell, and keep yelling. It all happens so fast; there isn’t enough time to start to wonder what I’ll do if he tries something more.

In fact, he leaves. He seeps away into the crowd. I don’t know if it’s because me and my friends are yelling at him, or if it’s because he’s done what he came to do.

We’re shaken. Tess is shaken. I am shaken. It seems like no one else has noticed. One young man in bright pink shorts and Kanye West glasses makes a gesture at me as if to say, ‘Is she okay?’ I shake my head.

Esmé later tells us that a couple of women who have witnessed what happened ask her, ‘What did she do? What did she do?’

*

We go home, back to Jane and Tom’s flat. In the sink I wash my shirt, now soiled with the grease and dirt of the night. I make Tess and I cups of tea. We sit on the sofa and watch a funny movie with Jane and a couple other friends who are also staying the night here. It’s only nine o’clock, and it feels like we’ve been awake for a century.

We sleep sardines on an air mattress. I try to sleep. I can’t.

I start thinking about danger. I start thinking how unsafe I have felt, tonight, other nights, other days, months ago, years ago. I start thinking, and can’t stop thinking, and then I feel my chest soaking up this feeling of grief that I want to scream out, and I stifle it, and think, I’ve got to get out.

I get up and go to the toilet, and try heave out some sobs as quietly as I can. I get up and go to the kitchen, get water, sit on the floor, and try to breathe. I think I’m having a panic attack.

Eventually, Jane wakes up and hears me. She sits down beside me on the floor. I explain what I think is happening. She’s calm. ‘I’ve had this before,’ she says. ‘It’ll pass.’

So we sit and whisper low together, for ages, until eventually, it passes. She hugs me. ‘You’re not alone,’ she says.

*

The last time I had a panic attack was just over a year ago. I had spent all day applying for a job, this job that I now have, in fact. I had left it too late, I had to finish it that day, it was taking much longer than I’d expected. I was over at my boyfriend’s place; later we were going to Lydia’s birthday dinner. I knew she was looking forward to it, being with all her loved ones, eating good food and getting drunk on good wine. I’d spent all day writing this bloody application instead of hanging out with my boyfriend. I finished the application and went for a walk, there was still some time to go before we had to get ready, and then we were back, and then… Then the quiet, pervasive malaise, left over from the stress of the application – it wouldn’t go away. It grew in the background while I walked, while I came back home, it was there in the dark, murky greyness of that London winter. All of a sudden I was in the kitchen, stopped halfway through doing the things I needed to do to get ready and go, get ready and go, paralysed, I could barely speak. He was trying to talk to me calmly, ask me what was wrong.

‘I don’t think I can go to the party,’ I said eventually. We went to the living room and I lay on the sofa. He brought down a duvet and covered me with it. We called my dad, and Dad drove me home. Both of us missed the party.

Ash Wednesday

The next morning I woke up before anyone else, made a cup of tea, got dressed and decide to go for a walk. I took my phone and turned on my 3G. In the bright daylight of seven thirty a.m., the streets were almost deserted. I was going to buy groceries. I was going to be alone for a moment. I made my way to the canal, plugged my headphones in, and called my friend Elias.

I’ve known Elias a long time. Since I was twelve. When I was thirteen, I screwed up my courage and asked him out. I still had puppy-fat, I had a terrible haircut, terrible fashion sense, braces, glasses, awkwardness and brashness in equal confusing turn, and I decided to ask out the kindest, most beautiful boy in school. We were also good friends. He was shocked, then pain-stricken. It was a no, I knew immediately. I almost sprinted away. And yet we grew into better friends in the years after that, and ten years later, here were are, on opposite sides of the world, trying to communicate over a crappy Skype line.

He could hear me, but I couldn’t hear or see him, so he wrote his answers to my spoken words. When I looked at that conversation afterwards, I saw an odd little poem, a string of one-sided lines, unpunctuated and filled with as much emotion as he could get across in little typed letters, typing as fast as he could as I cried my heart out and told him what had happened.

how

shit

insane

fucking insane

how does she feel?

it’s not fucking fair

no, you couldn’t have

what? I didn’t hear

shit

I know

I’m fucking proud of you

and I had a panic attack last night and I haven’t had one in a year, and I just started thinking about all of the times I’ve felt unsafe, like when I was at school and then university and then

It seemed like there were always people in positions of power over me who tried to make me feel small, powerless, ashamed, not because they thought about me or that I was a person but because they wanted to gratify their own selfishness and insecurity, because in the Carnival of their own little pocket of power that they built up around their world like a fortress they felt they could break apart the rules of basic civility or humanity or fairness or goodness and do what they wanted to me and get away with it because they were the ones making the rules and I wouldn’t know what to do because I would be left helpless, that’s why I try so hard at school to treat my students like human beings, that’s why I try so hard to do the right thing by people and do what’s fair

that someone can just do that to you because we’re women and we don’t want them to touch our bodies

and I felt all those times I’ve stopped feeling safe with people and it makes me feel so

alone?

fuck everyone who doesn’t make you feel safe

fuck them

fuck their idiot ways

you are so fucking strong

but that’s why its good to be a bit sad as well

feel it, and absorb it

but don’t get stuck in it

cus they don’t have the right to make you get stuck in that

they don’t have the right to make you feel anything

don’t get stuck

the motherfuckers are not worth it

and then he surprises me, because I’ve never heard him use these words or express this much anger,

I hate them

I hate them all

and I realise that it’s probably the first time, in our ten-year friendship, that he’s ever heard me cry.

March

I’ve been talking to a therapist since the end of January. I tell her about what happened. I tell her that I’ve never witnessed violence like that before, not physical violence like that. I tell her how I feel a bit self-conscious talking about how witnessing that violence has affected me, because it wasn’t me who got smacked in the face.

She tells me, ‘Don’t underestimate how traumatizing it can be to witness violence, and feel helpless.’

I realise that almost every time I see that sort of personal, intimate violence, or hear about it happening to people I know, it hurts me. I feel it. I can’t stand it. I can’t bear the violation. It makes me shake with rage. It makes me shake.

The panic attack that keeps me awake after Mardi Gras is not the last; in fact, the after-effects of Carnival shake up the first few weeks of March. I’ve been triggered into high anxiety, my therapist, Shoshana, assesses. I keep having these attacks.

I see something online that reminds me of one of those times of helplessness – and I stop looking at social media for a few days, because twenty-four hours later that little trigger has me moaning on the sofa and calling my parents and trying to calm down by listening to them be there.

I go for a run with friends, and the exercise feels good; but the next day I go alone, and with no one to distract me, my body pumped up, heart racing, mimicking all the physical symptoms of anxiety, my mind begins to race through more of those past hurts that I can’t do anything about – and then that night my senses play tricks on me and I swear I can feel someone standing right behind me, looking at me, and when I turn around no one is there, and my dinner goes cold as I sit and breathe at the table for minutes, minutes, minutes, minutes. I call Elias again. I’m scared. Your body can play tricks on you when it’s confused, when it’s trying to protect you.

Shoshana explains what’s happening to me. She teaches me about ‘dual awareness’, ways of trying to focus on the exterior world to distract my body from what’s happening inside. Instead of focussing on breathing and what’s happening inside of you, focus on what you can see, hear, touch, taste, feel, smell. The heat, the colours, the textures, the sounds of people’s voices, the way they’re walking down the street.

I used to be very good at focussing on the exterior. I meditated, I did yoga and mindfulness. I just walked and looked and listened, turned my face up when it rained. Even in the midst of depression, when I could feel it slipping away from me, it was something I clung to: the focus. The faded, yellow-orange roses. I’ve lost practice and it’s harder now. It takes days, weeks before a morning comes when I realise – I can see those leaves on that tree shifting through the wind, I can really see them, feel them there, feel myself seeing them. It’s hard to explain; but when I find it, I feel lucid.

After a few weeks, I have on-days and off-days. I’m fine and going along and then I’m not, I’ll be shopping and my heart will start pounding, or I’ll be at work and I have to leave and walk around for ten minutes because my heart just won’t stop beating hard, hard, hard. My body’s tricked itself: when my heart rate goes up, for whatever small reason, it thinks I’m in fight-or-flight, and it gets stuck. Sometimes the panic comes back too. I might be feeling fine and then – there – there – it’s there again – go to my room, close the door, cry, cry, call someone, is someone online, no it’s too late in London, it’s too late, wait, is someone there – yes, someone’s there! Oh, thank God.

I’m still doing things, everyday things, but things are slowing down. I need to slow down. All my most painful thoughts sit waiting for me in bed at night, first thing in the morning. One day, all of a sudden, I find myself praying to God, I feel the urge out of nowhere in the murky river of my thoughts and then I’m sat on the side of my bed, feeling every word pressing against me, Give me strength, I need help, I need it.

Fuck. Praying to God? That’s a new one. I don’t believe in God. I’ve never felt the need.

When I was really, really depressed, I understood for the first time why people believe in heaven. How wonderful to finally find a place where all the things that needed saying no longer needed saying, and all the hurts between souls were, just like that, gone. And in times of real, dark, paranoid panic, I began to believe that there really was no one there, no true friend to help me, besides my parents and those others who had loved me since I was a baby, and beyond that, I was alone. But now I know there are people there, even if they are on the other side of the world, and there are people right beside me too, sitting up at night on a cold kitchen floor, whispering low until I feel okay. And I know I’m much stronger now than I was then.

A couple weekends after Carnival, I go visit Tess up north in Sainte-Marie. We go grocery shopping, make a good dinner, watch a Marvel movie, and make crêpes for breakfast the next morning. The sun comes out after endless rain, and we walk out over the tombolo, Sainte-Marie’s most famous attraction. There’s a little double rock of an island just off the shore of the town, and at this time of year, the tide is low enough that you can walk out over the water to climb up on it. We lift our skirts up and carry our shoes in one hand, and I feel the strange rushing currents of the sea from two fronts at the same time, coming from either side of us. The sand is perfect beneath our feet, no rocks, no pebbles, no shells, no seaweed, and all we have to contend with is this doubled-up sea, one sea pushing us this way, another sea pushing us that way, us striding carefully through the waves to our destination, strength pushing through our feet and legs. They say Manman Dlo, Mother Water, lives on the island, a siren-like goddess with powerful abilities to manipulate the elements for her protection and strength. We look back and see a curving line of people following us through the waves: friends, children, parents, laughing as their clothes get soaked by a sudden wave that shoots up against limbs into the sky. The sight is incredible.

I have good chats with Tess. We talk about what happened. She’s been processing it as well. It was only a few moments, and yet for her as well as for me, it roughed up so many other stories and tangled up knots of things out of the sea.

‘Trauma’ is a strong word that is scary to use, although it would probably do us all good to recognise how common it is in plenty of people’s lives. Many of us have witnessed things that stick with us and throw back the past up out of the sea, into the present, at heart-stopping moments. I like how Clarissa Estés calls them ‘battle scars’, because it reminds me of courage. Or, there’s a poem by César Vallejo where he goes

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… ¡Yo no sé!

There come blows in life that are so hard… I don’t know!

I don’t know either. And at the same time, I do know. There are many things I know, now, at the age of only twenty-two, twenty-three this spring.

*

That’s my Carnival story, the best that I could manage. It took me about a month of thinking and feeling and letting myself be before I felt I could pull out the words. That’s a little song of the story, which pulls at so many other stories – and in all this time, so much more has been sifting through my daily experience of living here in Martinique, so many more thoughts have started crystallising and prodding my brain, saying Tell me! Write me! Figure me out!

Now I’ve got to get on to the rest of them.

Post-script

I wrote this little song to cheer myself up one day

‘Brave’

Sometimes things feel really fucked up

Really really really fucked up

and I always feel I should do something

but in fact most times I cannot.

But I do love a lot, relentlessly,

and I cherish any little love that falls my way.

I pick it up off the pavement

blow off the dust

and kiss it awake.

I’m always brave.

Notes

[1] There’s a story behind this, as behind all Carnival tropes, which are essentially a collection of memes from that year in the island’s social life. It’s a small island, one must remember, and in the 21st century that means that an overheard argument with a girlfriend filmed on someone’s phone (for this example), or a Whatsapp conversation sent to the wrong group, or a mistaken bit of grammar in an official’s syntax can all make their way into the shared jokes and communal ‘laughter-at’ of Carnival.

[2] In fact, they are. Nicole tells me later that recent regulations have come in that have forced all bwajak cars to get insurance in an effort to reduce the number of abandoned scrap-heaps left all around the city afterwards. How strenuously regulated the threshold for ‘insurable’ is, who knows.

The César Vallejo poem quoted above is ‘Los Heraldos Negros’.

All names have been changed. The next dispatch will arrive in 2 weeks.